JUDGING SITUATIONS - ON THE EFFORTFUL PROCESS OF TAKING DISPOSITIONALINFORMATION INTO ACCOUNT

How do people draw inferences from others' behavior? Research suggests that it is an effortful process for perceivers to take situational in formation into account when drawing a dispositional inference. It is p roposed that this previous work may reflect perceivers' general diffic ulty in thinking about alternatives rather than a distinction between how people think dispositional ly and how they think situationally. An experiment investigated whether it requires effort for perceivers to take dispositional information into account when drawing a situational inference. Participants viewed a silent videotape of an anxious inter viewee with the goal of diagnosing the degree of anxiety provoked by t he interview topic. Participants were given either calm or anxious inf ormation about the interviewee's personality. Within these conditions, half of the participants were cognitively busy and half were not. Non busy participants were able to use information about the target's disp osition when drawing situational inferences, whereas busy participants were not. A second experiment replicated this finding and demonstrate d that the effects were not due to differences in how the behavior was interpreted. These experiments suggest that it is an effortful proces s for perceivers to take dispositional information into account when d rawing a situational inference, and that, in general, effort may be re quired for perceivers to think about alternatives.